Jimmy Dorsey was the polar opposite of his younger brother, Tommy---a friendly but introverted fellow who was farless likely to get into ego squabbles with his musicians. (And far less corrupt: there were no rumours of onerouscontracts giving him fifty percent of his musicians' lifetime earnings if they left his band for any reason, the waybrother Tommy liked to impose.) The older Dorsey was also more musically adventurous than his kid brother . . .but you almost wouldn't know it to look at his surviving discography, because it concentrates so heavily on hisclever vocal hits (usually, involving Bob Eberly singing a song ballad style to open, then the ensemble havinga swing before Helen O'Connell or Kitty Kallen would sing the song again but with a swinging, uptempo style) thathis instrumentals aren't as well anthologised.

Jimmy Dorsey was also friendlier to bebop when it arrived than were other swing band leaders, and it wasn't unheard of for his band to stretch and blow with the vocalists on the sidelines more often than other popular swing bands; temperamentally, they considered themselves jazzmen first. He never imposed his own personality on his musicians and it probably surprised the music business when, after he was finally forced to disband his orchestra, he re-joined brother Tommy in 1953, considering they'd broken up when Tommy walked out of their band over amusical dispute (supposedly, Tommy Dorsey didn't like the more freewheeling arrangement Jimmy favoured; JimmyDorsey continued the band under his own name from then on while Tommy Dorsey put his own organisation together.)That reunion lasted long enough for the brothers to host a television show that provided Elvis Presley his first television exposure; Jimmy Dorsey died of throat cancer a year after brother Tommy died in his sleep under heavy sedation after a heavy meal.